Assessing the Harms of Crime: A New Framework for Criminal Policy

Victoria A. Greenfield · Letizia Paoli

pri 2022 · Oxford University Press

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Assessing the Harms of Crime provides a firm analytical foundation for making normative decisions about criminal and related policy, taking harm—and its reduction—as a conceptual starting point and supplying the means for systematic, empirical analysis in a harm assessment framework. By exploring harm's place in legal history, theory, criminology, and related fields and by considering the relevance of harm and its reduction for both criminal policy and the governance of security, the book demonstrates the centrality of harm, including its reduction, to crime, policy, and governance. It also highlights a substantial gap in methods available to the policy community to take on harm and the challenges of developing them. Working to fill that gap, the book presents the authors' "Harm Assessment Framework," consisting of tools and a process to identify, evaluate, and rank harms and to carefully distinguish between harms that result directly from activities and those that are remote or driven at least partially by policy. The book also presents applications to complex crimes, primarily involving coca and cocaine, that show the framework's value with new, actionable insight to harm and policy. On this basis, the book argues that criminology would benefit from expanding its mission to include harm and target harm reduction and from positioning harm assessment as a core task. Lastly, it posits that systematic, empirical harm-based policy analysis can contribute positively to decisions about criminal policy and the governance of security and to advancing justice.

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Victoria A. Greenfield, Senior Economist with the RAND Corporation, specializes in national security and international social and economic issues, including transnational crime, with research spanning drug production and trafficking, human smuggling, chemical diversion, and cybersecurity. Greenfield completed the research for this book and chaired the National Academies' committee on reducing the threat of improvised explosive device attacks as a visiting scholar in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University. Previously, she held the Admiral Crowe Chair in the Economics of the Defense Industrial Base at the US Naval Academy and served in senior positions with the President's Council of Economic Advisers and US Department of State. Letizia Paoli is the Chair of the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at the KU Leuven Faculty of Law and Criminology and a Life Member at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Since the 1990s she has published extensively on organized crime and illegal drugs and on related control policies. More recently, she has also researched the harms of crime, public perceptions of crime seriousness, and corporate and sports-related crime. Paoli is the recipient of the Sellin & Glueck Award of the American Society of Criminology and of the Distinguished Scholar Award of the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime. In 2020 she became a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Science and Arts.